Ryan Barrett's blog

Keep Bridgy Publish dumb

Listening for responses to your silo posts and
backfeeding them to your web site was the
first service Bridgy provided, and it’s still the most popular. It runs entirely
in the background. No UI needed.

Blog webmentions run entirely in the background too. Bridgy sends webmentions
for you when you write a post, and it receives webmentions and adds them to your
posts behind the scenes. Again, no UI needed.

Publish, however, is a different beast. It has a user interface, which is where
most people start. Even after that, when they
automate it via webmention, they often still
want an interface of some sort or another to customize their silo posts, and
that’s where the trouble starts.

POSSEing is simple sometimes, complicated
other times. You craft tweet text, convert formatting, @-mention people, add
hashtags. These are not one-way operations. Characters need to be counted,
formatting iterated, mentions and tags auto-completed. You’ll want to preview
your post. You need multiple round trips against the original post using a rich,
interactive UI. Honestly, you need all that inside your CMS.

Like the rest of Bridgy, Publish is a service. It has just two operations,
publish and preview, which doesn’t exactly lend it to richness or interactivity.
We could force the issue and make plugins for the bigger CMSes – Known,
WordPress, etc. – but I think that’s a losing battle. I wouldn’t build them
myself, and I’d look hard at any new features they needed.

The one concession I’m considering is
letting users specify the exact text
to publish in their silo post. This would let advanced users craft custom posts
for each silo in their CMS, and still reuse Bridgy’s POSSE API code. That’s it
though.

Bridgy can and should be a best of breed backfeed service. Bridgy Publish, on
the other hand, cannot be a best of breed POSSE tool. I doubt any service
could be. My strongest inclination at this point is to keep it dumb, define
precisely how it translates your original posts to silo posts, and avoid trying
to offer UX where none can survive. It’s a mug’s game.